Notebook
It seems almost unbelievable that next Week, after the longest-drawn-out retireMent ceremony in history, Mr Jack Jones Will finally cease to be the General Secretary of the Transport and General Work Union. It is perhaps hardly surprising tl'at Mr Jones has been so determined to s, Pio out the farewell tributes. Trade union teaders seem to vanish more quickly and completely on their retirement than any other figures in our public life. One day, the nation is having to hang on their every tortured utterance about 'decisions democratically arrived at by my executive comrtuttee'; the next they are totally forgotten (Iny case is scarcely weakened by the fact that some rash publisher is shortly to pro(Lillee, I gather, a life of Frank Cousins — I Luardly imagine that the bookshops will be sieged by purchasers). The rapidity of Lite. se men's descent into oblivion is not surPrising, since with very few exceptions the trade union leader is an extremely ordinary rtl.ao who is only inflated to the illusion of gigantic stature by his block vote; take that EtY`iay, and he no longer exists. This is particularly glaring in the case of Jack Jones who, on the few occasions when he has been
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emined as a human being rather than a sYMbolic figure, has seemed a very depre!slog nonentity. Around the time of the "Y-long junketings in the Festival Hall last 111,09th, when he was being hailed with the aid of the Prime Minister and Mike Yarw,00d as one of the 'greatest living ,tMglishmen', I wonder how many people °card a Tonight report on the TGWU's sabotaging of the new freight depot at DidSomehow the BBC had managed to Orbtain the transcript of a private meeting at .1MIsp0rt House, in which Mr Jones was fig roughshod over various of his brothers' from lesser unions, whose memrs were in danger of losing their jobs "lough the TGWU's action. A more Pathetic and abusive display of bullying it Would be hard to imagine. Not a very nice Man at all.
la:t!t Week I expressed the hope that the would re-show the remarkable television film based on Nicholas Bethell's The tam Secret. I am delighted to hear that this „uas now been scheduled for 10 pm on aturday 8 April on BBC 2. One irony wf. Inch has become even greater since the u!In was first made in 1975 is the noticeable absence of Sir Patrick Dean, one of the civil servants who played such an enthusiastic Part in the repatriation of Russian prisoners M1945. Sir Patrick declined the BBC's invitfa,Pon to take part on the grounds that the `uto would be 'bound to lead to con troversy'. Last month Panorama showed another highly controversial film about events in 1945, relating in particular to the very casual arrangements made by the British for the rounding-up of Nazi war criminals (tens of thousands of whom escaped any kind of justice). There on the screen, large as life, was the publicity-shy Sir Patrick, apparently quite happy to appear on this occasion, in order to explain why the Foreign Office had been so lackadaisical. 'It was very difficult to get people', he said; 'practically all our men in uniform were doing other things'. Such as, one scarcely needs to point out, rounding up two million Russians in order to hand them over to the NKVD.
93IQGEST CORRUPTION PROBE SINCE POULSON' headlined one local paper. I sup pose many people must have thought it inevit able that sooner or later Camden Council, 'the worst of the big spenders', would become involved in a major corruption case. The one which ended at the Old Bailey last week, involving five former employees of Camden's Surveyors Department, lasted no less than seventy-four days and cost the taxpayer half a million pounds. Nevertheless, the sentences handed down by Judge King-Hamilton, of nine and eighteen months, scarcely seem to justify such excitement. Even half a million pounds is only the price of a new embassy in Abu Dhabi these days. And, as always, the point about councils like Camden is to recognise that 'what they'll do unbribed' is far worse in social terms than anything which a few free holidays paid for by a building firm looking for contracts is likely to lead to.
To my sorrow I have never heard the newly stateless Rostropovich in the concert hall, although in recent months I have At last been catching up with the marvellous set of the Beethoven cello sonatas he recorded with Richter back in the mid-'sixties. Whenever I hear his name, 1 always think of a story told by my sister, who accompanied him as an interpreter on one of his first tours of Britain. On their way up to Manchester, they fell to discussing Dr Johnson. My sister thought that they should divert for a brief visit to Lichfield, the great doctor's birthplace. When they arrived, the town was dominated by the sound of bellringing from the cathedral. Rostropovich, who had never heard this uniquely British form of music before, was entranced. My sister, who was a bellringer herself, took him up to the bell tower where, when the session was over, she introduced him to the ringers simply as a 'Russian visitor'. They were so taken with the voluble stranger that they invited him to write his name, in Russian, in their visitor's book. They asked for it to be translated — and much to Rostropovich's astonishment (he was nothing like so well known then as he is now) they turned out to be great admirers of his recordings, and overjoyed to have entertained such a distinguished guest.
In 'The Older Hardy', Robert Gittings quotes from Hardy's notebooks: 'Prominent mediocrity — conspicuous by the very intensity of his mediocrity — the late Bishop Sumner'. Apart from the accuracy of the observation — public life is full of people who seem to flourish solely by virtue of their mediocrity (e.g. Lord Glenamara) — my eye was caught because the unfortunate Bishop in question happened to be my greatgreat-great-grandfather. Sumner's preferment in the reign of George IV was meteoric. The King's offer of a canonry in 1821 almost led to the downfall of the Liverpool administration. By 1826 he was Dean of St Paul's, and the following year, at the age of thirty-seven he became Bishop of Winchester — a post he was to hold for forty-seven years (he still lies behind the High Altar, beneath an enormously pompous marble effigy). Family legend has it that Sumner owed this dazzling emergence from obscurity to the fact that he had agreed to save George IV's mistress from embarrassment by marrying a Swiss girl with whom the mistress's son had become infatuated. The marriage does not seem to have been conspicuously unhappy — despite the fact that my three-greats-grandmother had to endure a siege in the Bishop's Palace at Farnham during the Reform Bill riots of 1832. Sumner's 'mediocrity' earned him a mention in the original version of The Return of the Native; but, as Gittings shows, even this dubious fraction of literary immortality was denied him when, in later editions. Hardy emended my ancestor's name without a blush to that of his predecessor at Winchester, Bishop Tomline.
Christopher Booker
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